A digital communication network comprises installations linked together by a communication bus, for example the IEEE 1394 bus, using wires or waves. The network of domestic type comprises, for example, the following installations: terminals allowing the users to store and reproduce audiovisual documents, terminals allowing the users to view audiovisual documents, digital television receivers (a decoder for example) capable of receiving audiovisual documents originating from a transmission network or from a point-to-point network (internet for example), a device for storing the audiovisual documents (a video recorder), a modem, etc. The list of the installations is not exhaustive. There may be several of each installation within the communication network, for example it is conceivable that, for a domestic communication network, each room of the residence has a terminal, that several receivers make it possible to receive documents originating from several transmission networks, and that the communication network has several storage devices of different type, for example a digital video recorder and a hard disk. The network can be managed in a centralized manner with the aid of a control installation or distributed, each installation having the possibility of controlling the network alternately.
The documents that may be recorded possess attributes which define their size, their type (audiovisual, audio, executable program, etc), their topic (film, documentary, news, advertisement, etc) and sometimes a subtopic for certain topics (in the case of a film: action, romance, adventure, horror, cast list, etc.).
The digital communication network allows the users and the applications to share resources within a residence. These resources may be classed according to the fact that they store information, or that they use stored information. The sharing of the resources poses problems relating to the transfers of information through the network and the occupancy of the available bandwidth.
Let us assume for example that a user invokes the viewing of a document recorded on a storage facility situated in another room, and that at this moment the network is overloaded, the user will not be able to see his audiovisual document correctly.
Patent Application EP1 161 087 describes the reception and the storage of an audiovisual document within appliances linked by a network. The storage appliance is determined as a function of data introduced by the user associating a certain type of audiovisual document with one or more appliances. However, this system requires the intervention of the user to program such associations, this necessitating manual operations.
The present invention allows better optimization of the storage space distributed between the various installations of a network, and improved usage of the bandwidth of the network by decreasing the number of data transfers. The present invention thus makes it possible to optimize the use of the recording devices connected in a network. Moreover, the present invention avoids the need for the user to indicate the storage appliance upon each receipt of a new document.